Socialist Rose Is Starting To Wilt In Europe

SEVILLE, Spain — Spain's political season is open, dominated by scandals, although these are unlikely to decide the outcome when Spaniards vote for a new parliament in March.

The scandals are mostly commonplace affairs of political and financial payoffs and thievery. One is trivially royal--a case in which corrupt bankers allegedly tried to blackmail the king. But one scandal concerns 27 murders, and could convict members of the present government.

The socialist government of Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez is accused of having ordered the murder of Basque terrorist leaders and activists operating from French territory between 1983 and 1987. The prime minister himself is alleged to have been aware of the affair, which he denies.

The case is interesting because of the degree of moral outrage it has provoked in Spain, which suggests that Spain today is a society with moral expectations of its leaders rather higher than in most countries.

In many democratic countries this affair, if true, would be considered a distasteful affair of political or security expedience. The United States tried for years to kill a foreign chief of state, Fidel Castro, and while this was finally halted by Congress and by press attention, neither the Kennedy, Johnson nor Nixon administrations were ever very apologetic about it. Ronald Reagan later ordered a bombing of Tripoli, which had as one objective the murder of Libya's exotic and inconvenient dictator, Col. Moammar L. Gadhafi.

In the aftermath of the Algerian war, French agents assassinated certain leaders of the Secret Army Organization rebelling against the government in Paris and trying to kill President Charles DeGaulle. Britain is accused of having given its SAS commandos "shoot to kill" orders concerning IRA terrorists in Northern Ireland.

The Spanish are said to have run a "death squad." That expression usually denotes a campaign of murder against political opponents inside the country, as in Argentina in the years of the generals' dictatorship, between 1976 and 1983.

What Spain did--if these accusations are true--was hire gunmen to kill activists of the Basque separatist movement in refuge in France, who were organizing car-bombings in Spanish cities and attacks on Spanish government officials. The French government was tolerating these separatist activities and failed to cooperate with Spanish police. The Spanish allegedly took matters in their own hands.

The murders are now the subject both of court proceedings and parliamentary inquiry in Madrid, and will undoubtedly have an effect on the election in March. However, the bloom has been off the Spanish socialists' rose for some time now.

A rose, clutched in a worker's fist, was the happy invention of socialist publicists in France, distinguishing a friendly Left from the threatening one symbolized by hammer and sickle. They went on to win power in 1981, and the Spanish socialists, under the leadership of Gonzalez, won in Spain in 1982 and have held power ever since. The Labour Party in Britain today is hopefully campaigning under the symbol of the rose, rather than the red flag, to oust John Major and the conservatives from power.

In continental Europe the fortunes of the socialist parties have drastically faded since 1981-82. In France they lost parliament in 1993 and the presidency last spring. They left office in a miasma of money corruption scandals. Conventional wisdom says that the Spanish socialists will follow.

The argument is whether the conservative Popular Party led by Jose Maria Aznar will win an absolute majority or merely a plurality. His group is a heterodox alliance of moderate, Christian-Democratic style conservatives with some more authoritarian types and some rigid Thatcherites, who call for the state's dismantlement and wholesale privatization.

The interesting aspect in both the French and Spanish cases, however--certainly from the American viewpoint--is that parties and personalities are sanctioned rather more than the policies of the socialists, which continue to find sympathy.

In Spain, current polls give the socialists some 32 percent of the vote and the Popular Party 40 percent. Yet it is suggested that if Gonzalez should lead his party into the election next spring he could make serious difficulties for the fairly colorless Aznar. Polls suggest that he could add 5 percent to the socialists' support.

Gonzalez may, of course, find himself in court instead. But in Spain, as in France two years ago, the time for change has arrived, and will no doubt take place. The socialists are victims of the corruptions of time and the wastages of power, as well as of the corruptions of money and morals.